Xenoblade Chronicles X has always been the outlier of the series for me. Despite being the first of the series I ever played around the time of its launch, I got stuck about 75% of the way through and never returned to it until now. I recall loving the design of the world and enjoying the core of what the game presented me, but it was a constantly mired experience due to numerous unclear mechanics, iffy design choices and my lack of experience with this type of game entirely. So, this remaster has finally allowed me to experience the black sheep of the franchise, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it - I must have done, given how addicted I was, beating the entire game in a single week.

Visually, the game is a stunner – this is the first Xenoblade title to run at full HD resolution, and the world shines all the better for it. Vast environments stretch out in every direction, with each continent taking on a different style of vista which leads to differing traversal paths, with innumerable gorgeous visual setpieces depending on the time of day, weather effects, and elevation within the world. This goes a step further once you unlock flight for your Skell, allowing you take in the planet on an even grander scale. The fact the world is such a looker is all the more impressive given the sheer density of the available landmass to traverse – I was always looking for new routes and thinking ahead on how best to navigate hostile terrain.

The way Mira is separated into segments, each with a specific task allocated to it to further your exploration rate, really pushed me to find as much as I could, doing my best to optimise my way to completing various tasks whilst also taking in as much of the world as possible. It truly addicted me in a way no other Xenoblade has. However, once I was able to fly everywhere in my Skell, this addictiveness was cut down in a way where I don’t get to admire the world design nearly as much from a gameplay standpoint. I was not as rooted to the world as I was when traversing on foot, which is a natural result of the game opening up to such an extent suddenly. The previously mentioned vistas do make up for it somewhat, however.

Side quests are written well and make me care about the NPC characters, and party members get decent growth through their affinity questlines - despite not going out of my way to complete very many, due to how they lock you out of story chapters altogether. I can distinctly recall a good number of quests from this game, whilst I really struggle to remember very many from the rest of the series at all – that's how well the NPCs shine in these moments, despite the scale of their missions varying wildly from simple fetch quests to elaborate multi layered story beats. It makes the denizens feel alive nonetheless, and feeds into the theme of Mira being the new home to a multitude of races, and that they are all in it together, like it or not.

In stark contrast, however, the main storyline is just kind of there, with not very many twists at all and no real moral quandaries until chapter 11 of 12. This falters more than it should due to knowing about the mimeosome twist from my original playthrough years ago, whilst similarly knowing about the ending through online hearsay. Even considering this, I struggle to imagine the story really elevating much higher than my current opinion of it – the core narrative progression is made through side content, not the main story, so XCX is naturally going to waver in this department due to the nature of how the game is structured.

Soundtrack wise, it's awesome! There are more vocal tracks than I thought there would be, and despite how cheesy they can be they are at worst good, and environment themes are top notch stuff as well. None of it can hold a candle to the main series soundtracks though, despite the quality and quantity on display here.

The quality of life features this remaster brings are embraced wholeheartedly, with a much cleaner UI, legible fonts, improved follow ball functionality (despite how questionable it can still be), and a multitude of other improvements to make the overall experience much smoother. The visual facelift to HD is stunning, as is the facelift for the core characters, but NPCs still have the doll like Wii U game faces and it can be a little jarring at times. Similarly, lesser party members seem to have a bit of an in-between level of face quality, which is equally as jarring to me.

Let's talk about the combat - ground combat can be a ton of fun when you have levelled up a bunch and have access to more arts, chaining effective arts together to really bring the pain to your foes, but the quick cooldown can often make fights feel a bit tedious later on since you have SO many of them available to burn through from the start of every fight, making battles mashy and quite thoughtless. Overdrive similarly feels mashy, with it still being poorly explained and nonsensical as to why it works the way it does, whilst also making the gameplay extremely unclear with an awful blur effect. Battles are ultimately very fun about 75% of the time, but the other 25% was a mix of not having enough options early on or having too many options later on; the perfect balance for me was found somewhere in the middle.

To contrast, Skell combat is simply not fun in the slightest. Arts take forever to recharge, for some reason you can’t use the new quick cooldown mechanic in these moments until beating the postgame chapter; ultimately it is overall just slow and clunky with not a lot of satisfaction felt in these moments. The cockpit time mechanic activates at random and doesn’t seem to actually do anything aside from recharge all your arts, which I appreciate, and activating Overdrive whilst piloting a Skell doesn’t bring any of the boons of grounded Overdrive, for some reason. It makes Skell combat very dull and something I actively try to avoid wherever possible.

Boss battles vary in quality and enjoyment a lot, with a good amount feeling very fun to beat with Overdrive in the earlier portion of the game, but the last third of the game requires you to minmax some gear and abilities or really learn the intricacies of unclear battle systems the game never really goes out of its way to make sure you understand fully. This led me to feel like I had to be a significantly higher level than what the game suggests you be at - leading to INSANE difficulty bumps since grinding is time consuming and not fun at all, which just led me to hire a busted avatar through the online system so they can one shot the boss for me after my multiple hours' worth of prior attempts. Boss battles with Skells are as unfun as the base Skell combat I described earlier, except this time being tirelessly drawn out with enormous health pools and zero thoughtful gameplay on the player’s part. They are truly awful.



Epilogue stuff – MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING

The sudden about face from the themes of the base content is quite stark, and whilst not something I was opposed to per se, it did feel rather odd that we are suddenly not only departing the planet we have spent dozens of hours cultivating to be our new home, but also departing the entire UNIVERSE. I can see people really not enjoying the thematic flip, but it did ultimately lend itself to some pretty interesting lore and an amazing final cutscene setpiece. Exploring the concepts from Xenosaga of equivalents to the collective unconscious and the universal domains was very interesting, especially with how simply the game presented these difficult to parse ideas.

The new character Al is quite fun, I like his personality a lot and what he brings to the story. His “how’s it popping” stuff was kind of weirdly overused, but endearing, and he more than made up for this in the rest of his character arc. A few other characters got some growth, such as Lin and surprisingly your avatar, which was good to see - the latter of which actually made me care for my blank slate self-insert a decent amount and gave them more character than anything the main game ever provided.

I was not a massive fan of the balance between lore dump/running around Mira for some final bits compared with the amount of time spent exploring the promised new area of this new content, despite some rather good moral follow-throughs for a couple of NPC characters and the interesting reasonings for why things are going the way they are. It felt like there was a split of around 60% prepping to leave Mira, 30% Al spilling lore and 10% being in the new continent, whereas I would have preferred the balance to have been more even.

This portion of the game introduces a new enemy type – Ghosts – that can only be defeated by targeting a specific appendage, as the rest will be invincible to all attacks. The Ghosts might be the worst enemy type a Xenoblade game has ever put forward, since appendage targeting is extremely unclear, and said appendages are six tiny orbs that you can never really see due to these enemies floating in the most awkward spot out of proper view of your camera in 99% of scenarios. They suck, plain and simple, with the major combat portion of one section of the epilogue chapter requiring you to take down around a dozen of the fuckers whilst piloting a Skell – your own Skell will be almost useless against them here, only Al’s special Skell can take them down in any timely manner. Said timely manner being TWENTY ENTIRE MINUTES of this frustrating odd one out appendage targeting minigame to then sit for minutes at a time per enemy, using the occasional art after they take an eon to recharge. This was a truly miserable experience, probably the worst in the entire game, with zero friction and zero urgency throughout.

Rant over, back to some more balanced thoughts on the postgame content – the new villain Void makes for a kind of shallow yet intriguing vague villain, and nothing he is or does seems to retcon or go against the previously established elements of the base XCX story. Being a genius who tapped into his universe’s version of the Conduit and ultimately becoming a being who thirsts for the knowledge of what death is was a decently gripping concept, with an equally enticing payoff when he does eventually die.

The new continent was sadly rather lacking – it’s a rather small area, essentially being the innards of Void’s prison whose only purpose in terms of gameplay is to serve as a maze to gather up your party members and shoot some spears into Void for an easier final battle. However, I basically did not engage with this very much as it just felt pointless and I wanted to see the story through to its end, and along with having the aforementioned busted avatar hired I just didn’t feel compelled to do anything but rush the final boss after a light amount of exploring. Which really does suck, since the visual design of the new area is dynamic and contrasts with the continents of Mira, with a couple of great music tracks for the area and the battles therein to boot.

The final couple of cutscenes truly made me root for the cast and their nigh on miraculous universal jump attempt, with spectacular camerawork and choreography combined with a stellar music piece emphasising the stakes at hand. I would have loved such cutscene work from the main game content, but I understand this was an unfeasible factor for of the game’s development, so the final cutscene being so great is more than a worthy compromise.

As for how the epilogue chapter links XCX to the rest of the series, I think it is pretty inoffensive. I was personally hoping for there to be more of a concrete link to the core universe of XC1/2/3, but the presented concept of XCX’s Earth being an entirely different universe, as is the same of Mira, was fine. The inconclusive final shot of an Earth did not help in narrowing down if the cast made its way to the world of the main series or not, but I feel like they are trying to keep it separate for the time being. Again, I don’t mind, its inoffensive, but I wanted a little more out of it. I look forward to if/when Monolithsoft decides to return to this cast and universe in a later game.

So, overall? - XCXDE is something I am very happy to have finally gotten round to finishing after a decade of putting down the original, with incredibly engaging areas and side quests and a solid battle system that was satisfying to engage with for the most part. However, main story content was rather lacking, with not a lot of intrigue being thrown my way until the new postgame stuff, with said postgame elements being an inoffensive wrap-up to bring XCX in line with the rest of the series, elaborating on entirely new concepts for the franchise in simple yet straightforward ways. The game is a mixed bag of high highs and middling lows, which ultimately balances out to a weird no man’s land of excelling at some elements better than the numbered games, but similarly faltering at core pillars that make said numbered games truly special to me, such as the ethics and moralities presented through the main story beats. I enjoyed my time a ton, and I think I would like to see a second attempt at a truly open world experience like this again, but with a steadier story foundation and more balanced attempts at combat. XCX sits as the worst in the franchise overall for these reasons, but only by a small amount. I am very happy to have finally experienced what Mira offers, and can see why the game is held in such high regard by its diehard fans, but I feel like I need a slightly different direction to truly love what this game puts down.

Rivals of Aether 2 is an absolutely stunning step up of a project compared to its first game, and the years worth of development time and effort is absolutely felt in the sheer quality of the animation, the balancing, the gameplay variety amongst the cast, the online being FLAWLESS (which somehow is a first for the genre) - there is so much this game is doing right, and its vast success is amazing to see.

However, as it currently stands at launch, there is just not a lot to actually do with the amazing gameplay systems that are on offer. All there really is on offer is fighting random players online, playing locally, aaaand that is basically it. There's an extremely light arcade mode which consists of dull CPU battles, with a target test stage in the middle, and it just cannot carry the game in terms of additional modes of play by itself. Being a veteran of the Smash games for well over a decade, I have been through the grind to become as best as I possibly can across multiple titles now, and doing that same thing again in a game where the skill floor and ceiling are much higher than in Smash is simply not something all too appealing to me. I need other things to do, and whilst Smash has a ton of stages and items for allowing matches to consist of a lot more on the fly decision making, and a bunch of smaller supplemental modes, Rivals 2 just has... nothing to offer on this front. I know it is a case of Smash being the outlier here, and the devs are doing their utmost to ensure their game does well, but it just kinda sucks having nothing to do but grind against players who are well versed with the vast mechanical depth of Rivals and infinitely more time in the prior game too.

Aside from the gameplay, I do have to criticise the unlockable cosmetics - it is simply an ABSURD grind in order to unlock anything significant. There are little profile images and such, but the main draw - skins and extra colours - cost SO much money (real or in-game) and takes an eon to earn enough. For instance, the "bucks" premium currency I have built up during nearly 20 hours of demo playtime and 6 hours of Twitch streams watched for extra bucks has barely earned me enough to unlock a new costume. I have enough to unlock maybe 2 alternate colours, but those are quite literally a palette swap and do not feel worth spending the currency on. It is a sad system that we will need to live with for all the DLC characters to be free, I get that, but jeez... could have made it somewhat easier to earn currencies, you know? As a result, the entire shop of hundreds of items is simply not something that is gonna get me to play the game endlessly, especially with more colours and costumes releasing over time.

I will likely check out the game a year or so down the line, I can't wait to see how it shapes up in the end. But yeah, the lack of things to really do in the game is a major sticking point personally. It is objectively amazingly made though, I commend what it is going for and hope the devs all the best.

I first played Arranger played during Steam Next Fest and fell in love with its concept of typical sliding tile puzzle gameplay and ingraining it with a top down RPG adventure, and was particularly gripped by the gorgeous visuals on display and the witty writing making each character endearing in their own way. I am happy to say that all these aspects held up throughout the entire runtime of the game, whilst further improving upon the puzzle variety and depth that was on offer within the demo.

The plot is straightforward and simple - you play as Jemma, who doesn't fit in with her hometown due to her tile shifting abilities, and she sets out to definitively find out who she really is, meeting a quirky ensemble of people along the way; discovering the world and the mystery surrounding the Hold that is meant to keep the evil force of Static at bay. Gameplay consists of various tile sliding puzzles, which varies upon each new area with a gimmick of some sort to constantly keep you on your toes figuring out how to progress the current room, which I found to be rather addicting to just plough though. Getting a handle on quickly warping to the opposite ends of line of tiles was a fun way to make otherwise cumbersome traversal across larger areas equally as engaging as the core puzzles on offer. Optional puzzles up the ante a decent amount, but they luckily never got to that level of obtuseness where looking up the solution or skipping the puzzle altogether was something on my mind, whilst often also providing some new gameplay twist to force you to rethink your previous methods of progress.

One of the only issues I had was the lack of music, or rather most of the music takes a backseat during dedicated puzzle areas (swapping to more ambient soundscapes or flat out removing it altogether), or takes a good half minute or so to start playing within an overworld area, which is a shame given the sheer quality of the overall audio design on all fronts. The only other fault I had was a general feeling of the game being a bit too short (I beat it in just under 6 hours), though I don't know how the developers could realistically make the game last a good few hours longer whilst not running into issues with staleness or tedium with the puzzles and traversal. I did feel like I got my money's worth out of the title overall, but it was lacking that something to make it truly shine on after playing it.

Overall, Arranger is a very solidly crafted puzzling experience that truly does something new with the format at hand, which I hope can inspire other developers down the line to make a more grand experience out of otherwise "typical" (for lack of a better word) puzzle gameplay that simply plays out level by level with little connecting the entire thing together. I heavily recommend people play this game, it truly is a great time throughout with a charming protagonist, constantly evolving puzzles and engaging visuals and audio. I look forward to what the fledgling Furniture & Mattress goes on to develop next - they have absolutely proven their worth with Arranger.